You don’t argue with that sort of order – not when given by Priscus. Dressed in his favourite black, he seemed to have grown a foot taller in the emergency. Where everyone else was in or bordering on panic, he was all calm authority. The two men shrank back as if in unison. They looked at each other. They nodded. Priscus turned back to me.
‘Come with me,’ he said curtly. He didn’t look round as I followed him to the water’s edge. ‘This isn’t the mob’s work,’ he repeated, pointing across at the exit to the Harbour. ‘The easiest way on to that island is from the Egyptian quarter. The building on fire is deep inside the centre. Either the two mobs have joined forces – something that I don’t think has happened in living memory – or this is a coordinated attack. If the latter, your suspicions are right that someone in the Council is leaking to the opposition. The moment Nicetas raised the matter of your arrest warrants in Council, this became inevitable. If both mobs aren’t already on the streets, it can only be because it’s harder to call them out at short notice than to arrange a few terror attacks.’
Someone came over and asked Priscus for instructions. He gave them, calmly and briefly, never taking his eyes off the dark waters of the Harbour. This wasn’t Priscus the effeminate fop, Priscus the superstitious dupe I’d been planning to lead up river to Soteropolis. But you don’t rise high under a competent soldier like the Emperor Maurice unless you know what you’re doing in the heat of battle. You don’t get as close as he’d come to smashing up the Persians with Heraclius breathing down your neck unless you have some of the qualities of Alexander he was always fancying for himself. I turned and looked back at the burning ship. Men on the other ships were now running desperately about, putting out the sparks that continued to rain on their decks.
‘Look,’ said Priscus. I followed his pointed finger as it traced a path right, along the Lighthouse island to the causeway and beyond into the Western Harbour. When the wind blew so steadily from the north, I knew that ships came into the Eastern Harbour, but were sent out through the Western. ‘The plan is to panic us into launching the ships that don’t get fired. They’ll then be cut off with another attack of fireboats. If we can get them straight out to sea, there will be something at least to send off come the dawn.’
‘But what about the wind?’ I asked, holding up my sweaty hands. It blew soft but steady on them from the Harbour exit. I knew little enough of ships and sailing. But I knew ships couldn’t set sail into the wind – not in a crowded harbour, nor towards a point held by an enemy that might have another fleet of fireboats to send against them.
Well, I thought I knew these things. But Priscus, it was soon obvious, knew more than I did. By threats and bribes and sheer force of personality, he was imposing order on the chaos. The ship that had taken fire was burning beyond hope. Much of the grain might be pulled out of its hold, but it would burn and burn down to the waterline. But the other ships, after an age of yelling and pulling on ropes, were moving away from the dock. Somehow, the Harbour Master had found boats to pull them towards the exit. One of them positioned itself a few hundred yards from the exit, a dozen archers ready to let fly at anyone on shore who dared break cover to send out more fireboats at the other ships. The Lighthouse and the calm seas would help the grain fleet to pull itself into some order out there as it waited for the light and then some kind of formal orders to depart.
If I’d been the centre of attention when we arrived, I was now forgotten. Everyone looked to Priscus as he strode purposefully about the docks, his dark cloak flapping in the breeze, the dying flames glinting on the breastplate of his armour. Several times, I saw him laugh. Once, I even saw him clapping the Harbour Master on the back. There was no point standing where he’d left me. I was beginning to get in the way, as every square foot of dockyard space was rapidly taken up by more or less smoke-damaged sacks of grain. I found a little brick building and sat on a pile of ropes on the land side. After a while, I gave up trying to look dignified for the few people who bothered staring in my direction.
The dawn was now up, and Martin with his satchel of bread and wine had found me. Coward though he was, he hadn’t been happy with my orders to stay behind in the Palace. Now, the emergency past, he’d taken my orders as applying only to the night.
‘I saw some prisoners taken out under guard,’ he said, nodding his head back towards the dockyard gates. ‘They were young men – natives, I think. One of them was wounded.’
That would have been Priscus as well. I’d seen him barking orders at two boatloads of police officers as they set out across the Harbour for the island shore. One had made straight for the point from where the fireboats had come, another for a jetty about three hundred yards to the left.
‘I heard that only one ship was damaged in the end,’ he said.
I nodded and reached for the satchel of bread. I got up and looked uncertainly at the Harbour. The sun was rising fast in the sky, and it lit up the dimpled waters of the now empty Harbour. Far out, beyond the exit, the grain fleet rode safely at anchor. The wreckage of the burned ship was being methodically broken up and cleared away. A few men lay on the dockside, where they’d collapsed from exhaustion. Officials stepped over them as they counted and recorded the saved cargo.
Of course, I hadn’t been able to count the sacks carried off. Still, the impression I had was that most of the cargo had been saved. It was spoiled, and would never do for transporting all the way to Constantinople. One sniff at the bread made from it, and the mob there would start a riot of its own. Any but the most desperate barbarians would throw it back in our faces, and probably burn a few more cities out of wounded pride. But, washed and dried, it would fetch something on the local market.
‘But, little Martin, how delightful of you to remember breakfast,’ Priscus crooned, suddenly beside me. He took the unstopped flask from my hands and took a long pull from it. Face and hands black from the smoke, his armour discarded somewhere among the grain sacks, he still seemed to loom over the pair of us. He glowed, though exhausted. It was as if he’d taken the entire contents of his drug satchel – and had got the relative doses exactly right. He fell onto the pile of ropes that I’d vacated and mopped happily at his face. The wound he’d picked up on the road towards Siwa had opened up again, and the cloth came away covered in blood as well as sweaty soot.
‘Any news of events further inland?’ he asked.
I looked at Martin. He looked back, plainly confused.
‘Never mind,’ Priscus said. He turned his attention for the moment to the bread, and tore ravenously at the loaf.
‘I imagine there will be an emergency meeting of the Council once we get back,’ I said.
‘Not if what I’ve seen of Nicetas is representative of his behaviour in a crisis,’ Priscus grunted. ‘No, not if he’s anything like his dear and Imperial cousin.’ He put the bread down and laughed. I thought I might like some of the wine. But Priscus had the flask again.
‘You didn’t see him as I did outside Caesarea,’ he said, laughter giving way to bitterness. ‘The Persians had smashed through the wafer-thin front of our best troops. They’d found we had no reserves. Even so, I might have scared them back inside the gates if only I’d been able to pull the two wings in tight.’ He looked at me and Martin. I struggled to imagine what I now realise was an obvious tactic. Priscus noticed I wasn’t really following and shrugged. ‘But you’ll hear it all from the poor bloody veterans when Heraclius commissions you to write up the history of his reign,’ he said. ‘All you’ll have to do to make him shine like another Belisarius is to cut out the time he spent puking up his breakfast, and transfer to him my own part in organising the skirmish around his travelling chapel that kept the Persians from swallowing up the whole wreckage of his army.
‘No, my dearest boy, if Nicetas is anything like Heraclius, you’ll not want an emergency meeting this morning of his Council or with him.’ He sprawled back on the pile of ropes and stretched his trousered legs.
I chewed on
the crust of bread he’d left me and tried to look more like the Emperor’s Legate than I felt. Priscus ignored my efforts and turned to Martin.
‘Well, my little secretary,’ he asked, ‘how goes your trawl of all the churches in Alexandria?’
‘We’ve so far come up with nothing,’ I said, cutting short the mumbled response. This was a good time to announce I’d given in and was planning a digging trip to Soteropolis. That would recover some of my lost equality with him. I got no further, though. I as good as had the words in my mouth when one of the junior police officers came in sight round the brick building.
Priscus took his message and read it. He gave me an amused look and bent the sheet back into its containing band.
‘I would send you back to the Palace to recover yourself after this most stressful night,’ he said, just the right touch of irony in his voice to remind me of my own uselessness when it came to organised force. ‘However, something’s come up where it would be most valuable to have the pair of you as witnesses. I might also find Martin’s famed scribal skills of more than passing use.’
Chapter 37
The police officer bowed and stood back as he pushed the door open. One smell of what lay beyond, and the breath caught in my throat. It was like a butcher’s market at the end of a hot day. I’d been in the City Prefecture building any number of times. But it was never on police business, and never in the cellars, which were sealed from the main building by doors at each end of the narrow, winding stairs that led down from a room just off one of the side entrances.
I must have known this place existed. I’d been twice in the dungeons under the building in Constantinople that had served much the same purpose before the revolution. But these are places normally considered only when brought undeniably into mind.
As if he’d been going there every day for a lifetime, Priscus went up to the crabbed, pasty-faced official who sat in the first room of the City Prison. An underground room, about fifteen feet by fifteen, it would have been normal enough but for the smell. It was a place of filing racks and keys on numbered hooks. We’d entered through the door that led directly from the bottom of the stairs. Immediately opposite this, and to the right of the reception desk, another door led to what I could easily guess lay beyond.
‘I take it you have the investigation room prepared,’ Priscus said easily, dropping his message on to the desk.
The official looked closely at the unrolled sheet and nodded. He got up and bowed to Priscus and to me, and motioned us towards the other door.
Some of the more imaginative – or perverted – divines have written about Hell as a series of levels, beginning with the moderately unpleasant and finishing with the indescribably awful. I suppose the long, dimly lit corridor that ran from that door under the whole length of the Prefecture would rank about halfway down the scale of horror. Imagine cells five feet square and barely that high, each one crammed with half a dozen naked wretches beside whom the lowest trash of the mob in the streets above was clean and well fed. Imagine the smell of putrid excrements and sores burst open and left to fester. Imagine those desperate faces pressed against the bars of their cell doors. Imagine the whispered, hopeless cries for justice or simply for mercy, and you have the smallest gears of the machinery with which such order as Alexandria normally enjoyed was maintained.
If Priscus had seemed to have grown physically larger from the joy to setting things to right in the dockyard, he now almost filled the passageway separating those two lines of dehumanised horror. I heard a continual whispering of prayers behind me from Martin. For myself, if I could have squeezed my eyes shut and stopped up my ears and nose, I’d have done so. I wanted to be through this as quickly as possible. I wanted to get back to the Palace and soak myself in a bath until the afternoon, and stupefy myself with opium and with wine. If no fragmentary recollection of this ever came back to haunt my dreams, I told myself, I’d die content. But Priscus walked ahead of me exactly as if he’d been inspecting some guard of honour. He stopped once – I could scarce believe it – and actually pushed his arm through one of those grilles to stroke the bowed head of one of the prisoners.
‘Like Christ Himself,’ he whispered exultantly, ‘we must bear whatever cross Our Heavenly Father makes for us. Let His Will be done!’
‘Let His Will be done,’ came the response in cracked unison from the few voices that still could be understood at all.
We stood at last in a room deeper beneath the Prefecture. If low enough for the ceiling to brush my topmost hair, it was otherwise too large for the one lamp set into a recess by the door to do more than throw vague shadows beyond its pool of light. I could hear the gurgling rush of the flood waters through the stone grilles in the floor. With the waters came a chill breeze that made the smell almost bearable by comparison with what had been so far.
‘Do you know why I’ve had you separated from your companions and brought here?’ Priscus opened in conversational tone. He sat himself carefully on a small table that shifted under his weight, and looked at the three tightly bound figures who lay on the floor about a yard from his crossed feet. They could move their heads for looking around. Otherwise, they could do no more than shuffle like serpents on that cold and damp and sick-makingly dirty floor.
They were young men, I could see as my eyes adjusted to the still deeper gloom of this place – very young men. They certainly weren’t my age. If any of them had seen seventeen, I’d have been surprised. Obviously natives, they had the good build and clean look of the higher classes in any nation. Except for the different cut of their clothes, they might have been Greek. One of them looked away as Priscus leaned forward. His mouth moved wordlessly as if revealing some chant or prayer going again and again through his mind.
‘Your companions are low creatures,’ Priscus said again. ‘Their usefulness to me was limited. Before I have my afternoon shit, some of them will be dead. The others will be praying for death. This they might receive today. Or it might be tomorrow, depending on the mood of the assistants who have been set to work on them.’
Priscus stopped and recrossed his legs. He looked at his fingernails. He spoke with the calm authority of a man giving instructions to his secretary. Unblinking, the young men stared back. I wanted to take Martin by the hand and run away as quickly as our legs would carry us. I’d recognised some of the dim shapes outside the pool of light. All that kept me there was the knowledge of what I’d have to pass through before regaining the light of day – and, I suppose, the knowledge that Priscus would never let me forget what, if I remained, I might yet contrive to blot out.
‘You, however, are persons of far greater quality,’ he went on, his voice still bordering on the friendly. ‘You were not intended to fall into my hands. But you have, and you must accept that the Divine Providence has frowned on the plot conceived against the Empire by your elders – a plot of which I am assured you have far better knowledge than your companions.
‘Let me tell you now that you can make this easy for us all. Do you see that fat man over there by the door?’
I heard Martin drop something from his shaking hands.
‘If you give what I think are truthful answers to my questions, he will write them down. You will then be transferred to a more salubrious confinement than this until your evidence has been considered in court. You will then be released unhurt. If you incriminate any persons under whose will you would normally have inherited, your rights will be respected despite any confiscations that are made.
‘You have my word in this. You may not know me, but I am a person with full authority to make this promise. And I am sure you know the Senator Alaric. You will surely know that he is always good for his word.’ He broke off and looked at me.
I looked down at the young men. I was sure I’d seen one of them in a shop somewhere. It was hard to tell in these surroundings. I swallowed and tried to get some moisture into my throat.
‘Do as he says,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady as I co
uld. ‘Answer his questions and I promise you your lives. I promise this in the name of the Emperor.’
Silence. One of the young men looked up at me. His dark eyes glittered scared in the lamplight. I stared back and pleaded in silence for him not to be so stupid. Priscus had involved me in his promise. That meant I could enforce it on him, should he feel inclined to break it. The young man looked away. The other two didn’t so much as move their heads in my direction.
Priscus stood up and stretched his arms. He stood over the young man who’d looked at me. His voice echoed oddly in that low but extended room as he spoke slowly and with exaggerated clarity.
‘I will give you one final chance before we start some Greek lessons of my own. I must warn you, though, I am running out of time even before I run out of patience.’ He went to the door and tapped three times on the inside. He stood back as it opened. It was like watching slaves bring in the dining things for a banquet. There were lamps. There was a brazier, well heaped with glowing charcoals. There was even one of those little travelling desks that officials would carry about on their errands. Its inner compartment was stocked with waxed tablets and pens. Priscus pointed to it and looked at Martin.
The light and heat excepted, nothing more was needed. I’d been right about the dim shapes. When you’ve seen one set of torture instruments, you don’t fail to recognise more of the same. There were the spiked cabinets, the tables with their leather restraints and man-shaped depressions, the kettles for heating oil or water, or containing the corrosive fluids. On the walls were the usual racks of knives and pincers and hooked gloves.
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